I tend to agree with what George Carlin said about how everyone should just fuck everyone else until we're all the same colour. Is it racist (or worse) for a middle-class anglo whitey to advocate vigorous miscegenation? As a member of the "dominant" culture (as the fashionable idiom of our time so poetically pigeonholes me), is my yearning (impulse? drive?) to see my ancestor's genes mixed with those of the "Other" just a symptom of white male guilt? A born victimizer's attempt to salve the burning shame he feels over the bloody crimes of those same ancestors, through the appropriation of an imagined innocence or authenticity rooted in the racist archetype of the "noble savage" lurking in my white, middle class unconscious?
I hope not. But the original point is food for thought. Chaos Eugenics. What 3, 4, 5.8, and 11.11-dimensional angelic (and demonic) apes would come to life in such a world? This, I believe, is closer to the manifold heart of true diversity than the trendy, black-box-pluralist diversity-lite that pervades North American political and educational discourse presently. A radical distillation of the human essence, alternately BRIGHT and BURNING, or DARK, HOT and WET, or COLD, SHARP and STRANGE. It would certainly render the KKK irrelevant, and would have added an interesting dimension to the Black Panthers. Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton might even (have) approve(d), if I correctly understand their vision as giving precedence to the radical abolition of racism over the militant, armed pan-Africanism that they advocated as a means to that end.
A more serious question raised by this line of thinking is as follows: To what degree are cultural goods superimposable, and to what degree does a new cultural "programme" displace an old one? We have all heard of "linguistic genocide" or some similar gory rhetorical construct, but perhaps, in the shadow of very real atrocities in recent Western history, we are contaminating with paranoia and shame a process that should rather be complex, wild, erotic, and paradoxically dark yet enlightening . Cultural ideas, like people, need to confront each other, and to do all kinds of dirty human things like dancing and knife fighting and howling at the moon, and they also need to fall in love with each other, and through the eros of cultural synthesis bring to term and birth strange and beautiful hybrid offspring. After all, we have been reproducing sexually for millions of years. Can we really expect culture, whose evolution represents the apex of the human condition, to lurch along like some doddering anemone, sprouting tiny copies of itself that have no capacity to adapt other than their own vulnerability to mindless, artless mutation?
I hope not. But the original point is food for thought. Chaos Eugenics. What 3, 4, 5.8, and 11.11-dimensional angelic (and demonic) apes would come to life in such a world? This, I believe, is closer to the manifold heart of true diversity than the trendy, black-box-pluralist diversity-lite that pervades North American political and educational discourse presently. A radical distillation of the human essence, alternately BRIGHT and BURNING, or DARK, HOT and WET, or COLD, SHARP and STRANGE. It would certainly render the KKK irrelevant, and would have added an interesting dimension to the Black Panthers. Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton might even (have) approve(d), if I correctly understand their vision as giving precedence to the radical abolition of racism over the militant, armed pan-Africanism that they advocated as a means to that end.
A more serious question raised by this line of thinking is as follows: To what degree are cultural goods superimposable, and to what degree does a new cultural "programme" displace an old one? We have all heard of "linguistic genocide" or some similar gory rhetorical construct, but perhaps, in the shadow of very real atrocities in recent Western history, we are contaminating with paranoia and shame a process that should rather be complex, wild, erotic, and paradoxically dark yet enlightening . Cultural ideas, like people, need to confront each other, and to do all kinds of dirty human things like dancing and knife fighting and howling at the moon, and they also need to fall in love with each other, and through the eros of cultural synthesis bring to term and birth strange and beautiful hybrid offspring. After all, we have been reproducing sexually for millions of years. Can we really expect culture, whose evolution represents the apex of the human condition, to lurch along like some doddering anemone, sprouting tiny copies of itself that have no capacity to adapt other than their own vulnerability to mindless, artless mutation?
This is not a utopian idea. Economics, as well as alternative ways of "belonging," like family or religion or citizenship, will undoubtedly give humans reason to betray, cheat and kill each other for a long time to come. But wouldn't it be nice to finally put the ugly, rotting, and unstable idea of "racism" out of its misery? To rid the world of cracker ignorance, neo-nazi insanity, "reverse" racism, and the whole schizophrenic, bogged down, politically charged minefield of present-day intergroup social discourse? I imagine it would feel something like a long awaited and well-deserved spring cleaning. I hope it happens soon, because I'm getting really tired of the same old lame arguments about race.
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